How to Write Pulp Fiction
James Scott Bell
Contents
1. What Is Pulp Fiction?
2. Type Hard, Type Fast
3. Conditions for Success
4. The Top Pulp Genres
5. The Pulp Writer’s Insurance Policy
6. Generating Plots
7. Taking Your Pulp to the Next Level
8. Publishing Strategies
9. Marketing Your Pulp
JSB’s Start-A-Plot Machine
1. Opening Setting
2. Act of Villain
3. Motive
4. Hostile minor characters making complications for hero
5. Twists
The Armbrewster Memoir
Now You Can Call Yourself a Writer
Use Your Noggin to Get Lots of Ideas
Write as If It Were Impossible to Fail
Trouble Is Your Business
The Fiction Factory
Writing Resources
Copyright © 2017 by James Scott Bell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by Compendium Press
What Is Pulp Fiction?
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.
That’s the opening of the classic pulp story “Red Wind” by one of the greatest practitioners of the form, Raymond Chandler. The paragraph sets a tone. It gives you a sense of what’s coming. We know it’ll have at least one dead body and plenty of sharp gab.
Pulp doesn’t bog us down with thematic ambiguity or thick flights of circumlocutory style. (I consulted a thesaurus to get circumlocutory, which is exactly the kind of thing pulp doesn’t do.)
Pulp is escapist and entertaining.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
In fact, there’s a lot that’s right with it. At its best, pulp fiction provides a product that is every bit as desirable as a grilled hamburger made from choice ground beef, on a fresh bun, and all the right fixin’s. More hamburgers, by far, are consumed in this land than prime rib or filet. And when the joint that serves them up makes a quality munch every time, it engenders lots of repeat business.
So it is with quality pulp. It’s a fair exchange of money for diversion.
In the classic pulp era, roughly 1910–1950, many a scribe who could deliver the goods made enough dough for food and drink and a roof … and sometimes even a family. They knew what the market wanted and how to shape stories for the various genres.
And just as the fundamentals of a good hamburger have not changed, the basics of putting together a good pulp story remain constant. It’s the spice that you add that makes yours unique.
What has changed, of course, is the delivery system for books and stories.
The Kindle changed everything. For the good of both writers and readers.
Now we read on smart phones and tablets, and listen to audio.
All of which, for the writer who wants to make some lettuce at this game, spells opportunity.
Just What Is Pulp Fiction?
The term pulp fiction has a rich history and multifaceted meanings.
To some, pulp is fiction that provides transient pleasure, and nothing else.
To others, it’s hack work, “low quality,” a threat to literature itself!
Bosh to both extremes.
Some of the best prose stylists in American lit—such as Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald—were trained and nurtured by the pulps.
Historically, pulp fiction was that which was printed on cheap, wood-pulp paper and set inside lurid, colorful covers of magazines selling for a dime or fifteen cents. America in the 1920s and 30s was voracious in its reading habits, consuming not just books but an ocean of stories provided in well over a hundred magazines. The most famous pulps included Black Mask, Weird Tales, Dime Detective, Amazing Stories, Argosy, and Adventure. The most popular genres were detective, mystery, adventure, Westerns, confessionals, and fantasy.
Readers could not get enough of series characters like Perry Mason (by Erle Stanley Gardner); Tarzan (Edgar Rice Burroughs); Doc Savage (Lester Dent); and The Shadow (Walter B. Gibson).
The ladies were represented as well. A series featuring college-educated Ellen Patrick, who fought corruption in 30s Los Angeles as “the Domino Lady,” appeared in the pulp magazine Saucy Romantic Adventures. (Now wouldn’t you like to have a few original copies of that?)
Then the pulp writer’s world expanded with the onset of mass market paperbacks.
The first paperback publisher, Pocket Books, was established in 1939. It was followed by several other firms, including Avon and Dell. The books they produced sold for a quarter or less and were sized to fit on wire-rack “spinners.” That’s because traditional bookstores—much fewer in number before the chains arose in the 1960s—concentrated on hardcovers. The paperback companies saw a huge market waiting for them at newsstands, train stations, lunch counters, the corner cigar store, and virtually any other place with consumer traffic.
Using enticing covers, they banked on impulse buys. For a mere twenty-five cents, a businessman going on the road could pick up a reprint of a classic or maybe a good murder mystery. A housewife could snatch up a book along with her groceries.
World War II changed the market forever. Returning GIs weren’t into classics or cozy mysteries or romances. So the hard-boiled school of paperbacks sprang up, starting with Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury in 1947. The era of fast-paced crime stories with salacious covers had begun.
The 1950s saw an explosion of noir-ish fiction by authors such as John D. MacDonald, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis. Science fiction came barreling in, too, with prolific writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.
In the 60s, series characters proved enduringly popular. Shell Scott (by Richard Prather); Travis McGee (John D. MacDonald); and Mack Bolan (Don Pendleton) sold in the millions.
The 1970s brought the biggest pulp genre of all—category romance—to the fore.
In the 1980s, women began to enter the hardboiled market. Like Sarah Paretsky and her series character V. I. Warshawski: and Sue Grafton with Kinsey Millhone.
By the time the 90s rolled around, paperback fiction covered all genres, and was wide and deep with talent.
But then something happened. Something that has killed the mass-market paperback.
A little something called The Kindle.
Suddenly, with less expensive (and often free) pulp available online, and with bookstore chains closing (Borders) or shrinking (Barnes & Noble) the shelf space for mass-market all but disappeared.
In its place now is the new pulp of original, digital content.
With all that to look back on, we can make some generalizations about the breadth and style of pulp. In general, pulp fiction is:
Plot-centric
Easy to read (no need to run to the dictionary)
Fast-paced
Pulp fiction is enhanced by:
Colorful characters
Snappy dialogue
Intriguing settings
At its best, pulp fiction is satisfying. It meets a need, a legit one—the need for temporary respite from everyday life. That’s what readers of pulp have always desired.
&nbs
p; That being said, what is it that the pulp writer desires?
It’s pretty basic and, once again, perfectly legitimate.
What a Pulp Writer Wants
The philosophy of the pulp writer is to make money by writing fiction. He is not ashamed of this, for it is nothing to be ashamed of. Writing is a commercial transaction under the free enterprise system. The pulp writer provides a product and wants as many people to buy the product as possible.
The successful pulpster knows there is a craft to storytelling which must be learned and practiced. Even more, he knows one of the keys to success is being prolific. Words must be produced with a certain amount of regularity, if not outright speed.
The pulp writer can coexist with the literary writer, but often the latter picks a fight.
Like this one (who shall remain nameless) who wrote the following:
All writers wish for commercial success. But at what price? If you sell your soul to the devil of profitability, you have to be able to look in the mirror every day and say, without flinching, that you’re a commercial writer.
The pulp writer responds, “I look at myself in the mirror every morning, and I like what I see. Selling my soul to the devil? Excuse me? Is a plumber who prides himself on a job well done and who gets paid selling himself to the devil? Or the writer who wants to provide what so many readers want—a dream, a distraction, some joy? Gimme a break!”
A successful pulp writer named William Wallace Cook (writing under the pen name John Milton Edwards) wrote this over 100 years ago:
The tale that moves breathlessly but logically, that is built incident upon incident to a telling climax with the frankly avowed purpose to entertain, that has no questionable leanings or immoral affiliations—such a tale speeds innocently an idle hour, diverts pleasantly the harassed mind, freshens our zeal for the duties of life, and occasionally leaves us with higher ideals.
We are all dreamers. We must be dreamers before we are doers. If some of the visions that come to us in secret reverie were flaunted in all their conceit and inconsistency before the world, not one of us but would be the butt of the world’s ridicule. And yet, out of these highly tinted imaginings springs the impulse that carries us to higher and nobler things.
A difference in the price of two commodities does not necessarily mark a moral difference in the commodities themselves. The Century Magazine sells for 35 cents, while The Argosy sells for 10 cents. You will be told that The Century is “high class” and with a distinct literary flavor, perhaps that it is more elevating. Even so; yet which of these magazines is doing more to make the world really livable? Ask the newsdealer in your town how many Centuries he sells, and how many Argosies.
Readers are not made for the popular magazines, but the popular magazines are made for the people. Unless there was a distinct and insistent demand for this sort of entertainment, so many all-story magazines, priced at a dime, could not exist. (Cook/Edwards, The Fiction Factory, 1912, The Editor Company)
Pulp writers are secure in knowing that they help make “the world really livable” by providing the dream-like experience of a solid, entertaining story. When the National Book Award nominates five novels that sold an average of 4,000 copies each, the pulp writer is not angry or envious. He is fine with the fact that such novels are produced. On occasion, he reads one. (Though when he does, you may hear him muttering Do something already! )
The successful pulp writer knows it is good to make dough, provide entertainment, and be known as a solid craftsman.
And knows, too, that the writing game is a battle. Now, more than ever, it’s a battle for attention.
Type Hard, Type Fast
It’s the distractions, sweetie.
No, that’s not a line of dialogue from a pulp private-eye story. It’s the reality of our time. We are awash in an exploding universe of stimuli, screaming for our attention.
As one book industry insider put it, the internet “is in a trillion-dollars arms race” to grab and keep you. Even if they break through the noise and get someone’s attention, there is an ongoing battle to keep that person interested in more of your product.
So the challenge is not just to find readers, but to induce them to buy more of your fiction as soon as it’s available.
A report in The Economist (Feb. 9, 2017) put it this way:
The entertainment business is a never-ending and ever-intensifying war for consumers’ limited time and attention. Around the clock, each minute is contested by companies like Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Snap, Amazon, Disney, Comcast, AT&T, Sky, Fox and Netflix. Consumers can take in only so much of what is on offer. As this report has shown, faced with an overwhelming array of choices and guided by menus, digital rankings and suggestions calculated by algorithms, they increasingly pick from just a few of the most popular items. Technology and media companies are doing their utmost to induce users to spend even more time on each of their platforms every day. From tweaking algorithms to stepping up notifications to endlessly scrolling feeds, technology has turned human distraction into its metric of profit.
That’s why, for the pulp fiction writer, content is king. Getting more of the product out there. They type hard and type fast.
Type Hard
Type hard refers to the mindset of the pulpster. It’s an attitude that says, I’m charging ahead. I don’t care about the obstacles. I don’t give a rip about the odds. I haven’t got the time or the interest to think about the “cant’s.” Writing is what I do, so I do it.
This is how pulp writers had to think during the Great Depression.
Imagine getting fired from a job and not being able to find another. You need to put food on the table. There’s a big pulp market out there, so you hock what you need to in order to buy a typewriter and move to New York. You give yourself six months to get published. You type your stories in a cold-water flat and make the rounds of the publishing offices every day.
That was a common theme in the 1930s. One such writer was Frank Gruber, who wrote about his experiences in a wonderful memoir, The Pulp Jungle. In July of 1934, Gruber moved to New York with a plan to get published within six months.
My physical assets consisted of one portable Remington typewriter and my wardrobe which, aside from what I was wearing, fit very comfortably into one medium size suitcase. I had sixty dollars in cash, but paid out ten dollars and fifty cents of it for a week’s rent in advance at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel. I squandered another ten dollars over the long weekend, so that on Tuesday morning, when I went out to size up the pulp jungle I had approximately forty dollars.
I had one thing else … the will to succeed.
That’s what typing hard means. The iron will to succeed.
Have you got it?
That’s the first requirement of the pulp writer.
Type Fast
The other thing these writers did was type a whole lot of words.
Some of them—like Erle Stanley Gardner and W. T. Ballard—averaged a million words a year. A million!
That’s the equivalent of fifteen full-length novels every single year!
Frank Gruber tells about a writer named George Bruce who used to throw parties in his small Brooklyn apartment. One night the place was jammed with thirty-plus people. At ten o’clock Bruce announced he had a 12,000-word story due the following morning. He went to a corner where his typewriter was and pounded it for four hours, ignoring the party swirling around him. At two o’clock in the morning he announced he was finished and poured himself a glass of gin.
Gruber also got to know the most prolific author of all time. His name was Frederick Faust, but you know him by his famous pen name, Max Brand. When Gruber met him, they were in Hollywood working at Warner Bros. Studios. Faust had, by that time, written and published approximately forty-five million words.
Gruber asked Faust how on earth he did it. Faust asked Gruber if he could write fourteen pages in one day. Gruber said he’d certainly done so (fourteen pages is about
4,000 words), but had also gone two or three weeks without writing a line.
That was the secret, Faust said. He wrote fourteen pages a day, every day, “come rain or shine, come mood or no.”
That works out to one and a half million words a year.
The really remarkable thing about Fred Faust’s output was that he was the “biggest drinker” Gruber ever met. Faust would put away a thermos of whiskey during his morning writing hours. His lunch would be washed down by several more drinks. “When he went home at five-thirty,” Gruber writes, “he had a light supper and then settled down to his serious drinking.”
Faust was one of those extremely rare individuals who could drink like that every night and still operate in the morning. I do not recommend this method.
I do, however, recommend Faust’s seriousness about a quota. I’m a piker compared to guys like Faust and Erle Stanley Gardner, but I can tell you my average yearly output for the last seventeen years: a little north of 300,000 words. I keep track on a spreadsheet. It’s the most important writing practice I know. It’s the only way I’ve been able to write over fifty books, several novellas, a memoir, and many short stories—most of them published and making it possible for me to make my living as a writer.
Now, I know most of you do not have the luxury of quitting your day job and moving to New York. Or Yonkers. Or any other place.
You have family and a day job and obligations in your home town.
You want to write, but you have to squeeze in the time and can’t get all that much done.
That’s all right. The pulp authors of old would welcome you into the club if you have an iron determination and fulfill whatever quota you are capable of.
Take a look at your weekly schedule. Figure out the times you can dedicate to your writing. Cut something out if you have to, to get a little bit more. Do you really need to watch that Seinfeld episode you’ve seen twenty times? Is all that social media time really necessary?
How to Write Pulp Fiction Page 1
